Tomorrow’s Europe

This lecture series looks at the cultural, social, and political realities plaguing Europe. Particular attention is paid to the region’s culpability in the climate catastrophes, rampant nationalism, and LGBTQ+ persecution. Our speakers are preeminent activists across the post-Soviet space and offer radical perspectives necessary to reimagine the region.

All posters are designed by professor of Russian Language and Literature, Jose Vergara.

Andre Kamenshikov is the regional representative of Nonviolence International (USA) in the post-soviet states to the United Nations. He is also the founder of Nonviolence International - CIS and has been an activist in the peacebuilding field in conflict areas of the ex-USSR since 1992. He has worked in Transdniestria, Abhazia, Chechnya, and Ukraine.

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of Ukraine’s preeminent authors and cultural commentators. In his talk, Andrukhovych presents his personal and geopoetic vision and understanding of Central-Eastern Europe and Ukraine’s place in it. He has written seven novels, dozens of poetic cycles and essays, and translated several literary classics, among which are the works of William Shakespeare, Bruno Schulz, Boris Pasternak, and American poets of the Beat Generation and the New York School.

Activist-scholar Alexander Kondakov has made it his life’s mission to understand better and promote awareness of these issues in Russia and abroad. In his research, he studies court decisions on criminal sentences of violence against members of the Russian LGBTQ community and positions these developments within the legacy of anti-homosexual laws and movements in the Soviet era.

In her native Russia, Victoria Lomasko’s work is notable for its groundbreaking portrayal of marginalized populations, including sex workers, teenagers at juvenile correctional institutions, and LGBTQ activists, among others. Most famously, she also documented the trial of Pussy Riot. Through her graphic journalism, Lomasko gives voice to the voiceless in contemporary Russian society, and her most recent book, the bilingual Other Russias, has brought these voices to the Anglophone world.

Vladimir Kozlov is the author of a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, many of them nominated for major book prizes and translated from Russian into foreign languages. He also works as a journalist in local and global publications and has made several low-budget underground documentary films, including Sledy na snegu (Traces in the Snow) a groundbreaking look at the influential Siberian punk movement of the 1980s.

Maria Stepanova, born 1972 in Moscow, is one of the most prominent young Russian poets today. She is also an editor, journalist, and essayist, a founder of the cultural web site openspace.ru, and later of colta.ru. She has published ten books of poetry and two books of prose; her unusual memoir/novel, To the Memory of Memory, won the "Big Book" prize in December of 2018, and she has won multiple other Russian and international literary prizes as well as a fellowship from the Joseph Brodsky Foundation (2010).

Women of the Gulag tells the compelling stories of several female Russian labor camp survivors. While Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago largely recounts the experiences of the men caught in Stalin’s camps, Marianna Yarovskaya’s 2019 Oscar shortlisted documentary film features six women in their eighties and nineties as they go about their daily lives and reflect on their experiences. Their accounts range from the horrific to the uplifting: Ksenia, for example, lives in a pit covered by branches, and Natalia tends the empty grave of her martyred parents. For most, the interview process was cathartic. Adile puts it this way: “I lived so long to be able to finally tell the truth.” The film also juxtaposes the troubling resurgence of praise for Stalin with the fight to preserve and disseminate the memory of Soviet repressions, terror, and displacement.